James Brown

1933 - 2006

All Praises Due To... Your 2006 Philadelphia Eagles

As a lifelong Giants fan, I gotta give it up to Philly. All Praises Due-style. It's Xmas Day, and they're 9-6, tied with the Cowboys, who they whooped up on tonight, 23-7, for the divisional lead. Sweet month, thusfar:

- Started December at 5-6.

- Proceed to win their next four. Beat Carolina at home. And, then, THEN: At Washington. At New York. At Dallas. All on the road. All Divisional Opponents. All wins.

- One game to go. They host Atlanta on New Year's Eve. And even if Dallas wins their last game (at home vs. Detroit), the Eagles hold the tie breaker on the Cowboys. So their win tonight guarantees them a spot in "the Tournament", as Bill Parcells calls it.

9-6. I don't know how long Jeff Garcia is gonna keep it up (and, sure, by all means, genius, feel free to insert your expected, boring, and/or obvious "gay" joke or double entendre here, because YOU HAVE TO, what with being blessed with the curse of originality), but dude's played like a monster since filling in for McNabb. In his six starts, he's completed almost 62% of his passes, with 10 TD's and 2 picks thrown. Studly and sterling. (And T.O. continued to drop more balls tonight; the karmic justice just makes rooting for Garcia all the more enjoyable.)

The long and short of it is that the Eagles are playing with house money right now. They are playing like a team who believes they not only can go far but will go far in the Tournament. Handicapping the NFC, right now, I'd be willing to say, sure, Eagles could take the Saints for the NFC Championship. The Saints did beat the Eagles in the Superdome back in Week Six (27-24, featuring the Time-Expiring Stylings of John Carney, ladies and jellyfish! Drive safely!), but the Eagles are playing more consistent, if not better, football than the Saints. The Bears ("Crown their ass!!!") aren't much more consistent than the Saints, but their defense is so ridiculously fast, they'd definitely make Jeff Garcia run around all day long. But I do think the Eagles could definitely give the Bears a run for their money. Without question, those are your top three teams in this year's soft-ass NFC:

1. Chicago Bears (13-2)
2/3. Philadelphia Eagles (9-6) or New Orleans Saints (10-5)
4-6. Insert "one-n-done" of your choice. Giants? Hee! That's funny. (And perhaps the topic of a different post.)

Back

What? You didn't think I forgot about you, did ya?

Steve Phillips Is A Big Fucking Idiot, Part I

On the 10/01/06 edition of Baseball Tonight:

Steve Phillips, regarding possible (probable) AL Rookie of the Year, P Justin Verlander:

"He's a rookie because the age and numbers say he is, but the way he pitches he's not a rookie."

Huh. I thought Verlander was a rookie...cuz this was his first year.

Eight days left...

...in the baseball season and it's 11pm on Saturday night and I finally feel like talking about it.


-I never got around to congratulating the Mets on their first division championship since 1988, but I'm not really feeling that congratulatory vibe just yet. I'm excited for the playoffs to start, but I'm not as confident in this Met team as I was just a couple of months ago. The Mets are playing .500 baseball in September (11-11 thru today), David Wright just today hit his first home run at Shea since before the All-Star break, the starting pitching is messy and inconsistent. Thank God (or, if you prefer, Bill "The Spaceman" Lee - I know I would) for a killer bullpen, second only to San Diego's. I have a feeling they are going to be working a lot throughout this playoff season.

-Looks like the Dodgers are, perhaps, prepped and ready to have a fork stuck in their collective asses. The Dodgers, Padres and Phillies, all three teams competing for the last two playoff spots, all finish the season on the road after this Sunday's games and the Dodgers, far and away, have the worst road record of the three. Too much inconsistency for a team that was very much underrated thru much of the season.

-Early prognostication?

NL:
Mets
Cardinals
Padres
Phillies

AL:
Yankees
Twins (winning the AL Central)
Athletics
Tigers (taking the Wild Card)

Mets v. A's in the World Series.

No picks for who wins just yet, but I'm sure you can guess who I'm rooting for. But I think the A's are gonna surprise a lot of people in the playoffs. Yankees fans are more deluded than I thought they were if they really believe that Bobby Abreu is the puzzle-piece they've been lacking for the past five years. The Twins will be back next year, hopefully with a healthy Francisco Liriano. They were ridiculously good this year when they had Santana and Liriano anchoring their rotation. And since the Tigers will draw either New York or Oakland in the first round (they are 7-9 vs. NY/OAK), they will get Jim Leyland the AL Manager of the Year Award, but unfortunately no World Series ring to go along with it.

...more to come...

1991 - 2005

I'm a bit late on this. But, better late than never.

"Mel Gibson, Eat Your Heart Out!!!"

Lenny Clarke and Denis Leary stopped by the NESN booth a week or so ago to do the play-by-play for a couple of innings during a Red Sox game. They somehow got on the subject of 1B Kevin Youkilis' ethnic origin. Youkilis ended up having a hell of an inning. And, in the process, comedy magic was born...

Twenty Years Ago...

...the New York Mets were the best team in baseball. As of today, the Mets have the best record in the majors. To celebrate this fact, I found this Mets video from 1986 on YouTube today and just had to post it. The "80's"-ness of it all, combined with the inherent cheesiness of sports-team-videos, makes it a little tough to take. Joe Piscopo being in it only makes it worse.

08/31/06 - Mets record: 82-49, with 31 games remaining.

Your California Tax Dollars At Work

I found this today on crooksandliars.com:

The National Priorities Project has a real eye-opening website that calculates the cost of the War in Iraq and them compares it to what we could do with that money.

As a resident of California, here’s what they say we could be doing:

Taxpayers in California will pay $40.3 billion for the cost of war in Iraq. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:

* 16,733,296 People with Health Care or
* 627,551 Elementary School Teachers or
* 4,767,634 Head Start Places for Children or
* 25,168,314 Children with Health Care or
* 235,246 Affordable Housing Units or
* 4,390 New Elementary Schools or
* 7,685,109 Scholarships for University Students or
* 616,017 Music and Arts Teachers or
* 741,482 Public Safety Officers or
* 117,140,845 Homes with Renewable Electricity or
* 601,790 Port Container Inspectors

Check out your state's trade-offs.

Potty Mouth Theater : The Big Lebowski - Short Version

Atlanta gets spanked, then gets outed as foot fetishists

Jon Kruk, on Baseball Tonight, um, tonight, referring to the Mets' first three-game sweep of My "Favorite" Team in Atlanta since 1979, and Met centerfielder Carlos Beltran, in particular:

" . . .The Braves were on a roll. They were hot, and here comes everyone in the media, around baseball, saying, 'Here come the Braves, don't count 'em out.' Well, Carlos Beltran made it a- he took a personal disliking to the fact that the Braves were coming on their heels (???) and he decided to do something about it."

Eww. Reason #37 for me to continue to hate the Braves.

Braves Acquire Wickman; Here (They Think) They Come

Here are some numbers my friend and I were kicking around after we found out the news today that the Braves acquired Cleveland closer Bob Wickman:

Current Met Record: 57-38 (67 games to go)
Say the Mets go .500: 34-33 (ok, 1 game over)
Final Record Then Is: 91-71


The Braves also have 67 games to go.
Their record at the moment is 45-50.
In the last 67, the Braves would have to go 47-20, making their final record 92-70, to catch the Mets in this scenario.

Now I don't think that adding Bob Wickman to their roster makes that a lock to happen. But the trade today makes clear that, after the week the Braves just had, they certainly believe they're in it. I don't know about the rest of you, but I haven't bought my World Series tickets yet, if you know what I mean. I'm a lifelong Met fan, and they are kicking ass and I'm having a blast watching them, but I won't count the Braves out until they are 12 games back in September.

Now I'm fairly confident that, barring a colossal meltdown, the Mets are gonna do better than .500 the rest of the way. And even if the Mets do go .500, I know that the Braves going 47-20 is a pretty tall order, but even 85-90 wins, in this year's soft NL, may just get you the Wild Card. And I'm pretty positive that, at this point in the season, the Braves could care less about making it 15 years in a row.

to be commenced properly at a later date and time